Creating SSL Certificates ​

Paymenter's official guide to generating SSL certificates. An SSL certificate secures your site, displaying the padlock icon and "Secure" label in browsers.

1. Installing Certbot ​

First, we need to install Certbot.

bash
sudo apt install -y python3-certbot-nginx
bash
sudo apt install -y python3-certbot-apache
bash
sudo apt install -y certbot

2. Creating the Certificate ​

Using Certbot, we will create the certificate.

IMPORTANT

Make sure you are not running anything on port 80 — Certbot will not work if anything is using it. You can check with:

bash
sudo lsof -i :80
bash
sudo systemctl stop nginx
certbot certonly --nginx -d example.com
bash
sudo systemctl stop apache2
certbot certonly --apache -d example.com
bash
certbot certonly --standalone -d example.com

IMPORTANT

Replace example.com with your actual domain name.

Renewing Your SSL Certificate ​

Your SSL certificates are now active, but they expire automatically and need to be renewed regularly. You can renew them manually by running:

bash
sudo certbot renew

Or, you can automate this using a cron job, which is the recommended approach.

Run the following command to open the cronjob file:

bash
crontab -e

Paste the following line at the bottom of the file. This example will run the renewal process every day at 11:00 PM:

bash
0 23 * * * certbot renew --quiet --deploy-hook 'systemctl restart nginx'

IMPORTANT

Make sure to replace "nginx" with the name of your webserver (e.g., apache2 or another if you're using something else).